Доклад Luis Amaral на конференции SQA Days-19, 20-21 мая 2016 г., Санкт-Петербург

1. BUILDING A TESTING
TEAM
From an empty room to a fully productive team in
a short time
Luís Amaral
May 20, 2016

3. Agenda
• About me
• Context
• An empty room
• The plan and the timeline
• Architecture spotlight
• Hiring
• Infrastructure and room setup
• Training and knowledge building
• Processes and Tools
• Test case writing and reviewing
• Testing and learning
• Conclusions

4. About me
• Currently:
• Independent Consultant focusing on Test Management, Quality
Management and Project Management
• Vice-chair of the ISTQB® Marketing Working Group
• Co-founder and member of the board of the PSTQB
• Owns and runs an online business
• Lives between Switzerland and Portugal
• Past:
• Co-founder and director of Strongstep – Innovation in Software
Quality
• Worked and lived in several European countries with in
development and management roles
• Masters in Informatics Engineering from FEUP, University of Porto,
Portugal

5. Context

6. Context
• Telecommunications operator
• New E2E software with all its implications
• Billing
• CRM
• All provisioning operations
• Local adaptations
• Multi-site, multi million dollar project, large number of
people involved

7. An empty room

8. The plan and timelines
12.03 19.03 26.03 02.04 16.0409.04
Pre-UAT
Env. QA 1
Env. QA 2
UAT
Team definition - Tracking tool
training
- QA
preparation
- Tools training
- Arch. training
- Print Tool
training
- Other apps.
training
- JIT
shadowing
- Training
refresh
- Business test
cycles reviews
Test cycle writing and self-training
Team preparation UAT activities

9. Architecture spotlight

10. What’s the most important
item in a team?

11. Hiring

12. Hiring
• We had to focus on internal resources
• Ideal world:
• People with business, technical and test skills
• What do we prefer?
• It is easier to train someone to test than someone to have the
business knowledge
• We can hire/use some technical skills of other people when needed

13. Hiring
• What have we done?
• Identified the critical areas of the business that would require
testing
• Internal recruiting: full time or part time
• Key points:
• Avoid part time recruiting special in fast and resource shortage
environments
• Use them as soon as they are available, you never know when
you’ll loose your resources

14. Infrastructure and room setup
• Easy part:
• Computers
• Chairs
• Tables
• Setup/configure a full network environment
• In the telecommunications world there is not only software
• You have to have a fully functional network to test E2E
• Some of the tests have been done in a test network and others in
the live system
• Key points:
• All takes a lot of time, specially if it does not depend only on you,
start with this from day 1

15. Training and knowledge building
• The advantages we had:
• There were other countries that had a similar software deployment
in previous years
• There is a testing team fully managed by the integrator in place and
testing
• General introduction about testing
• What is testing
• What are the goals
• The psychology behind a good tester

16. Training and knowledge building
• We’ve focus a lot on testing on the job
• We’ve shadowed the previous phase testing team
• We’ve travelled to other countries to learn
• We’ve brought experts from other countries to teach
• Key points
• The business knowledge of the resources brought a great
advantage to leverage the experts available
• Until you start doing you don’t encounter any problems

17. Processes and Tools
• Typical day of a tester (in this environment and per area
of work)
• Environment checks
• Morning meeting
• Reporting
• Escalation
• What to do if I’m stuck
• ...
• Repeated this specific training
• Written process for the main happy path flows

18. Processes and Tools
• Group and individual sessions depending the tool goals
• E.g. incident management tool for all
• E.g. Billing tools to the billing team
• Everyone had a sparring buddy to support
• Key points:
• Repetition improves performance
• Spot checks improves as well performance and can bring great
team benefit

19. Test case writing and reviewing

20. Test case writing and reviewing
• We had users, not testers as a starting point
• How to bring them quickly into the test case writing mode:
1. Study other test cases
2. Review previous testing phases test cases
3. Write their own test cases
4. Discuss the written cases in small groups
5. Review the work done
• Rinse and repeat

21. Test case writing and reviewing
• Key points
• We’re all different
• Consistency is difficult and takes time
• Being very open to feedback is your best help to success

22. Testing and learning
• This was the easy part as we’re only starting the journey
• 5 weeks to go
• Training and learning never stops
• Psychology is important for people who never had this job
before and have been put under great pressure

23. Testing and learning: rinse and repeat

24. Conclusions
• Management support is key
• The 3 most important things: People, People, People
• We went live on time and budget, quality was good, surely
can always be better
• In the end a strong team was built
• A subset of this team stayed as the testing team, other went back
to their business jobs

25. Thank You!
luis.amaral@acm.org